Hollow City by Ransom Riggs

Author:Ransom Riggs
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9789085241522
Publisher: For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Published: 2013-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

8

Emma nudged me.

“So?”

“I need another minute,” I said.

Bronwyn had set down her trunk and I was standing on it now, head above the crowd, casting my eyes over a shifting sea of faces. The long platform teemed with children. They squirmed like amoebas under a microscope, row upon row receding into a haze of smoke. Hissing black trains loomed up on either side, anxious to swallow them.

I could feel my friends’ eyes on my back, watching me as I scanned the crowd. I was supposed to know whether, somewhere in that great, seething mass, there were monsters who meant to kill us – and I was supposed to know it simply by looking; by assessing some vague feeling in my gut. Usually it was painful and obvious when a hollow was nearby, but in a giant space like this – among hundreds of people – my warning might only be a whisper, the faintest twinge, easy to miss.

“Do the wights know we’re coming?” Bronwyn asked, talking low for fear she’d be overheard by a normal – or worse yet, a wight. They had ears everywhere in the city, or so we’d been led to believe.

“We killed every one of them that might’ve known where we were going,” Hugh said proudly. “Or rather, I did.”

“Which means they’ll be looking for us even harder,” Millard said. “And they’ll want more than the bird now – they’ll want revenge.”

“Which is why we can’t stand here much longer,” Emma said, tapping me on the leg. “Are you almost finished?”

My focus slipped. I lost my place in the crowd. Began again.

“One more minute,” I said.

Personally, it wasn’t wights that concerned me most, but hollows. I’d killed two of them now, and each encounter had nearly been the end of me. My luck, if that’s what had been keeping me alive thus far, had to be running out. That’s why I was determined never to be surprised by another hollow. I would do everything in my power to sense them from a distance and avoid contact altogether. There was less glory in running away from a fight, sure, but I didn’t care about glory. I just wanted to survive.

The real danger, then, wasn’t the figures on the platform, but the shadows that lay between and beyond them; the darkness at the margins. That’s where I focused my attention. It gave me an out-of-body sort of feeling, to cast my sense out into a crowd this way, prodding distant corners for traces of danger. It wasn’t something I could’ve done a few days ago. My ability to direct it like a spotlight – this was new.

What else, I wondered, was left to discover about myself?

“We’re okay,” I said, stepping down from the trunk. “No hollows.”

“I could’ve told you that,” grumbled Enoch. “If there had been, they’d have eaten us by now!”

Emma took me aside. “If we’re to have a fighting chance here, you’ve got to be faster.”

It was like asking someone who’d just learned to swim to compete in the Olympics.

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